YOU CAN’T FISH WITHOUT BAIT: Teaching for Sticky Learning — Part 2

I love fishing. But believe me, the fish won’t just jump on the hook by themselves. It takes work, having the appropriate bait, and some intelligence about what you are fishing for and what the obstacles might be. Thankfully there is a wide variety of bait available for you to use as you launch out on the “fishing expedition” that is sticky teaching and creating sticky learning environments.

In the previous blogpost, we noted two types of bait you might use to hook your students and encourage their memory: Stimulate more of the senses in your classroom and work to help your students connect new information with their prior knowledge. In this post, we’ll look at the remaining tips for sticky learning and then conclude by noting an example of a successful expedition in sticky teaching.

The Tips Keep Coming…

Sticky Learning Tip #3:  Emotional memory trumps all other forms of memory.

Emotions are like spices: sadness, love, joy, surprise, and anger get stirred into experiences, creating a unique flavor and providing meaning. Emotional connections answer the “Why is this important?” question. The effective use of emotional connections helps to establish relevance, helps students to care and be emotionally invested in the content and the learning experience, which in turn can motivate action. The stronger the feeling, the more easily the memory is recalled and the more durable the memory.

An emotional connection is an attention-grabbing device if applied effectively. While emotional memory is one of the easiest to trigger and will trump all other forms of memory, it is also challenging to create an appropriately emotional trigger or learning experience. Because emotional memory is so strong however, if the trigger is too strong and elicits a fear response, it can actually block formation of factual memory. We have likely experienced the use of emotion in a way that is manipulative or attempts to coerce us to feel a certain way. That’s clearly not what we are aiming for here. The emotion must always serve the message.

Tapping into emotional memory is a powerful hook for new information. The use of story and narrative is a simple method to enhance emotional connection. You might choose to elicit individual stories relating to a topic or theme or a collective story that is part of the shared history of a group or responding to a world event all participants are likely to remember, but it must connect to your overall theme or topic to be sticky.

Sticky Learning Tip #4:  Find your core message and repeat it.

Marketers know how to do this well. A core message is the main purpose of an overall class session stripped down to its most critical essence. The core message of your class session should be no longer than one sentence, with seven words maximum, due to the limited ability of our short-term memory. Creating a core message for each class session not only helps your students remember, but helps you stay focused on a clear goal.

But there is more to a core message than simply being brief. It must be thick, relevant, valuable, and multilayered so that it is not easily dismissed. It should ignite a curiosity to learn more. Once you have a core message, you need to magnify its stickiness by making it visual. Choose an image that best communicates the core message without detracting from it, then project this image on a screen or upload it to an LMS.

If your students have to hunt for the core message, their brain is working too hard. Rather than make your students search for your core message, why not tell them your main goal up front and allow them to use that information as hooks for the remainder of your presentation? Conduct your own informal experiment by crafting a core message for your next class. Distribute sticky notes to each student at the end of class and ask them to write down the core message they are taking away from class, using no more than seven words. See how closely their take-a-ways match your intended goal.

Sticky teaching is recursive: repeating ideas and concepts with increasing depth, like a Slinky. The coils in the slinky represent your lecture, along with other methods you use to help your students engage with the new information, symbolizing the repeated delivery of material that grows in complexity. The teacher who uses recursive learning seeks to illustrate, restate, reframe, reinterpret, and return to the core message throughout the entire class, using a variety of methods and means to broaden and deepen students’ understanding. This is not an opportunity to pack more information into a lecture or simply to restate your last point using different words, but rather an opportunity to communicate information more deeply. Recursive learning is like adding flour to gravy; it must be done slowly and carefully.

Sticky teaching lives in long-term memory by grabbing students’ attention with an emotional connection, clearly communicating the core message and by providing intentional opportunities for students to rehearse information and understand the value of repetition for their own learning, but there is one more item we need to add to our tackle box in this fishing expedition for sticky learning.

Sticky Learning Tip #5:  Demonstrate relevance and create interest.

Because our brains have such a short-attention span for incoming information (some scientists claim it is 90 seconds), unless we can capture the attention of our students and establish that the information we are trying to communicate is relevant, they may be physically present, but not mentally present. Our task as practitioners of sticky learning is to demonstrate relevance, create interest, and keep our students engaged.

The longer we focus our attention on an experience, regardless of where or when it occurs, the more likely it is that it will become part of our long-term memory. But this has its limits. Scientists have documented that listeners check out of a primarily verbal presentation after about ten minutes. So what’s an instructor to do? If you establish relevance by connecting new information to prior knowledge and create interest by the use of narratives or creating emotion-rich events, how do you sustain interest long enough for the brain to activate long-term storage mechanisms? The way to make long-term memory more reliable is to incorporate new information gradually and repeat it in timed intervals of no more than ten minutes, then to utilize what John Medina (Brain Rules) calls a “hook.” [For more information on Medina’s concept of hooks, see Brain Rules, chapter 4 and/or this PBL Pathways blog post.]

Hooks can and, I believe, should be fun. They should catch students off guard and cause them to look up from their notes. Your students also need to understand how to craft an effective hook regardless of whether they will pursue a pulpit or Ph.D. We do not pay attention to things that are boring because our brains are wired to pay attention to things that surprise us, intrigue us, tickle our synapses with novelty, or draw our interest as a prehistoric survival technique. While we no longer have to be aware of wild prey, the basic premise still remains. Our brains pay attention to things that are interesting.

Learning from Those who Have Fished the Waters Before Us

Many seminary and religious-studies professors teach a basic course in their field of study that students are often required to take. These basic survey courses have the difficulty of capturing a large body of content in a semester- or quarter-long format, when this may be the only class that students take in this subject area. The temptation is to try to cover it all and rely primarily on a format of lectures and quizzes or exams to test content knowledge.

Kathy Dawson, Associate Professor of Christian Education at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia is a practitioner of teaching for sticky learning. Utilizing brain research and learning theory, Dawson has reimagined course design for a basic survey course in Christian Education moving from a teaching focused class to a learning centered class. Dawson examines each aspect of the class including the format of the class, the content, the meeting space. She creates multiple entry points into the topic for the day using music, multimedia, puppets, and interactive tasks for the students. She utilizes small groups which meet both inside and outside the established class time to reinforce concepts and create ways to teach and interpret information to other students. Class time is varied each week and is spent in short presentations, interactive and experiential forms for learning the material, class discussions and projects, and group lessons.

Assessment is one of those possible obstacles in this fishing expedition. Dawson uses both summative and formative assessment tools with a goal to inspire a lifelong hunger for learning that sticks and grows. Above all, she understands that in the field of sticky teaching and learning, we will likely never see all the learning that occurs when long-term memory, rather than short-term recall is our aim.

 

Sticky Learning: How Neuroscience Supports Teaching That’s Remembered  is part of the Seminarium Elements book series.

Order today at fortresspress.com and Amazon.com.

Photo credit: “Pope’s Bait & Tackle” by Taber Andrew Bain. Licensed for reuse by CC BY-SA 2.0 license

 

 

 

 

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